This was such a great Masters Tour to watch, and as a Dutchman it's great to see Badajimpom do so well. Really hope he manages to snag some points in Undercity so he and Floki can represent the Benelux community in GM after the departure of Thijs and Tyler.

Very nice article as always Aesan! Just one little note: while Maverick speaks French and lives in France, he is still very much Belgian ;)

Dehumanisation of the enemy! Typical war tactic, Uther's a soldier after all

Hi,

Thank you for all the early support on Mercenaries! I love looking at what kind of parties others have thought of. It would be nice if there was some way to either import or manually select which Mercenaries you own, so you can quickly see if you can build a certain party. Thank you in advance!

Thanks for the great team and guide! Would it be possible to add a small section about which (especially epic and legendary) mercs are absolutely necessary and which can be replaced, and by which other mercs? Look forward to trying it out!

Sad to see Alutemu and Monsanto didn't make it, but damn happy Gaby did. The kid is a Hearthstone prodigy, winning world's would cement him as the GOAT no doubt

I'm rooting for Alutemu, Gaby and Monsanto. All three players that have shown how amazing they have performed this season and deserve to go to World's the most.

They are completely unreliable, because they only take a very limited amount of data. Especially looking at specific lists for very specific, low rank brackets will heavily skew your perception simply due to lack of data.

I'm sorry I hurt your feelings, but for balancing the game data between bronze and gold is mostly completely useless. People who stick in those ranks beyond the first few days of the month in general play a lot more homebrew jank and unoptimised lists due to lack of dust or knowledge. Of course a refined deck like Quest Mage will shred right through those, so will every other refined list. In fact, in those ranks Quest Mage isn't even a problem at all, since you have decks like Elemental Shaman and Aggro Druid with 65%+ winrates. But sure, I'm the biased one.

I think the loss of passion for a large part actually is fixable, albeit not completely like you say. It used to be that if you wanted to be the best, you would always have to try to get better because you know many others were vying for those same HCT points. In GM however, you only have to try for fourteen weeks per year, against other people who only have to try for fourteen weeks per year. That's why you often see new GMs perform so well, like Gaby and Frenetic, because they still have the grinding mindset which creates passion for competitive people. If you're already at the top, and only have to focus for a short amount of time each year to stay there, that fire goes out and your passion goes away.

Sad to see so many great players leave again. Not only old legends like Surrender and Thijs, but also promising newcomers like Rami and Floki. The whole system really needs an overhaul ASAP before Hearthstone esports is dead completely.

Quote From Alfi

According to HSReplay winrate of Quest Mage currently is 60+% for most refined lists.

Yeah, between bronze and gold, where almost nobody plays. HSReplay stats are completely unreliable, use vS instead.

This week really showed just how difficult Garrote Rogue really is. So many misplays at the highest level of play, I really will wonder how much of a menace it will be once people start mastering it.

Gaby is still the actual nuts. Frenetic is doing pretty well this season, and with the 5 bonus points is still equal to Gaby. Actually bonkers.

That has anti-synergy with itself: You want to buy them for the elemental part, but eat them with the demon part. Just buy them and go full elementals.

This really shows just how important it is to have a vibrant local scene. The top 8/16 time and time again consists of almost exclusively Chinese and European players, because of the vibrant HCT-like Chinese scene and loads of third party events in Europe (and France specifically) like the MAX Open and the ILH Open and League. If APAC and Americas want to catch up, local tournaments really are key. I just wish Blizzard would support them more, as now many players have to choose between competing in MTQs and competing in third-party events..

I think this has been one of the best metagames in a long time, both for ladder and in tournaments. This article shows it perfectly, every class had at least one viable deck and most even more. There have been many Masters Tours were pretty much everybody in the top 8 brought the same 4 decks, but that was far from the case this time. As a competitor it makes it a lot harder though, since you can't just trust in your own skill as a deck pilot and actually have to make important choices when picking your line-up. As an aside, massive props for predicting Fel DH so accurately in the theorycrafting! I couldn't have seen this build coming. That being said, BROOT ME DOOD

Great overview as always Aesan! Although it's weird looking at those decklists from months ago trying to figure out how weird they actually were, lol

Trahison was the true champion this week just for how he munched on that baguette

If you only define "control" decks as decks with outlasting their opponent as their only win condition, then indeed control decks don't exist anymore. And that's a good thing. Attrition decks are boring and hell to play against, give me a deck with a win condition any time. I'm also wondering how that Handlock list is aggro or combo, since usually it spends most of the early game just tapping or removing enemy minions, and playing minions and then smashing your opponent's face with them is not a combo. If anything, it's a control deck, since you spend most of the early game controlling the board using cards like Soul Rend until you either stabilise with healing or manage to get your threats to stick.

To be fair, the deck still works great even despite the card changes. It finishes games a little bit slower, but so do all other decks since the nerfs, so it's fine. I don't think this is the optimal build (I really like Spice Bread Baker) but in this case the balance changes were really just balance changes and they didn't kill the deck at all.